Three small black fine line star tattoos on the back of a person's neck, with a top panel showing the tattoo being worked on with a machine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small stars on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The upper panel shows a gloved tattooist working on the back of the neck with a tattoo machine, with one small star already visible on the skin. The lower panel shows the finished result: three small black star or asterisk shapes arranged in a loose triangle. The linework is thin and even, and the image is in black and grey against a purple top and a neutral background.

Fine line Neck Star Asterisk Tattoo machine Neck

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dust had got into the cab again, fine as flour, and Ruth wiped the dash with the heel of her hand while the radio hissed the same weather report it had given at dawn. Forty miles of the old Route 9 lay ahead, straight as a ruled line, and the only thing breaking it was the row of fence posts that the county had stopped painting years back.

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Her brother had taught her the marks when they were kids on the back road outside Barstow: a single asterisk scratched into a post meant water, and three in a triangle meant come back at night. Nobody had ever told her which of those things was true. She had come to think it did not matter, so long as somebody remembered to keep making them.

She stopped at the ninth post, the one with the split cap, and took the pocket knife from the glovebox. The sun was low enough to throw every scratch into relief. Three small stars went onto the grey wood, each one a careful cross with its own short bar, and she sat back on her heels to look at them the way her father used to look at a finished fence line.

A pickup came over the rise an hour later, slowed, and a man in a sun-faded cap read the posts as he rolled past. He lifted two fingers from the wheel. Ruth lifted hers back and turned the engine over, and the road went on being empty in front of her, which was how she liked it.